State Of Emergency: (Tom Buckingham Thriller 3) (30 page)

A woman entered the room. She was completely covered. She bowed as she approached, put a tray beside the bed and scuttled away.

He looked down. There was a mug and a teapot, a bowl, a carton of milk and, incongruously, a Kellogg’s variety pack. One of the younger men came forward, poured the tea and added some milk. Jamal drank, and instantly felt nausea rising. He put the mug back on the tray. The door opened again and Isham appeared. All the men stood up and there was a lot of embracing and back-patting. Then he turned to Jamal and opened his arms. Isham was freshly showered, his ginger hair glistening, and had on a brand new ankle-length
jubbah
, the creases where it had been folded still showing in the fabric.

‘And here we are,
Alhamdulillah
.’

Jamal didn’t move. All he could feel was anger boiling inside him. He hadn’t asked for any of this. He would have stayed inside prison and fought to clear his name, however hard and drawn-out that would have been. But that option was gone – and with it his beloved sister. He looked at Isham, smiling down at him as if he was some kind of trophy.

Months under the ever-suspicious gaze of Abukhan had trained him to mask his true feelings almost as a matter of course. He got to his feet shakily and accepted Isham’s embrace. ‘
Alhamdulillah
,’ he replied.

The group broke into applause.

‘You are a great prize, Jamal. All our brothers are celebrating your escape. Yours will be the example for all who are prisoners of the
Kuffar
.’ The loss of his wife had not dented his jubilation. ‘First you will bathe and then we will dress you in new robes and you will record a video. Your supporters will be waiting to hear from you. You must show them that you are free and ready to fight again. You must issue a call to arms.’

Despite Isham’s northern accent, pink complexion and gingery hair, he hadn’t only adopted the beard and dress of the Muslim: his pattern of speech mimicked that of someone whose first language wasn’t English. Evidently his supporters in the room, who were all Asian, were buying it. But Jamal had been here before, back home in Croydon, when he had fallen under the spell of the man who had originally recruited him to go to Syria. Britain was full of self-appointed zealots oozing hate-speak that masqueraded as religious belief. But there was something about Isham that marked him out. The others were buffoons, all mouth and posturing. Isham was a cut above. Horrific as it had been, the prison break had been meticulously organized.

The idea of trying to clear his name seemed absurd now. He still wanted to know what had happened to Emma; maybe he could find out from Latimer, the lawyer he had seen in Belmarsh. For now, he needed to play along with Isham and be his ‘prize’, but only so far. He decided that the fewer words he said the better. He should show no remorse. If he was their hero he would behave like one. He had observed Abukhan asserting his authority with silence: the fewer words he said, the more they counted.

He held Isham to him, then broke away and turned to the smiling group, his hand touching his heart. ‘Brothers, I thank you.’

63

‘This is the man who’s trying to destroy you.’

Jamal didn’t hear him at first; he was too stunned by what he was seeing. In the news report, a tight-lipped police spokeswoman refused to confirm the number of casualties or the names of anyone who was missing. But Vernon Rolt, the new home secretary, left no one in any doubt that Jamal had escaped, describing him as an enemy of the state, a mass killer bent on destroying Western values – even the most dangerous man in Britain.

Isham tapped the screen. ‘Welcome to the new reality. It’s nothing less than a declaration of war on Islam.’ He smirked. ‘This is your next target. And we are ready.’

Jamal was working on the basis that the best method of handling Isham was to play along with his plans, for now. Perhaps this was how he could escape his fatal embrace, maybe the only way. But he also realized that something in him had changed. He must avenge Adila’s death, and Isham was showing him where to direct his vengeance.

‘But he’s the home secretary. How do I even get near him?’

Isham’s eyes blazed. He leaned closer and spoke in a whisper, even though they were alone. ‘We have the means to get right up close. You will see.’ He made a gesture with his hands, miming an explosion.

Jamal said nothing. Whether this was pure fantasy or not, he didn’t know. The Belmarsh escape had been audacious but also planned with great precision. Isham was a fanatic, whose only thoughts were about his personal war on the British Establishment, his dream to see the black flag of the caliphate flying over Buckingham Palace. Jamal’s time in Syria had convinced him of the folly of the Islamist cause and the waste of life it involved. Now, seeing Rolt on national TV calling him those terrible things had rekindled his sense of outrage.

Isham gestured at the image of Rolt on the screen. ‘This man is using you to further his cause. We will show him what folly that is. You will declare war on him.’

Jamal folded his arms and gave him the dead stare that he had learned in Syria from Abukhan. No expression, just stillness. ‘No video.’

‘But, brother, we must alert the world so your escape can be celebrated. They are saying you are unaccounted for. The world needs to know you have triumphed.’

Jamal remained still. In the twenty-four hours he had been in Isham’s presence he had got the measure of the man. But Isham knew nothing about him. He just believed what he had read in the papers about the Aleppo massacre. He didn’t know the real Jamal at all. ‘If I am to do this, I want no video. Let people think I am dead.’

64

10.30
Pimlico, London

Sarah Garvey eyed the lawyer sitting opposite her. He definitely wasn’t her type, that was for sure. His buttoned-up collarless shirt said it all, and his brown suede shoes.
Never trust a man in brown shoes
: one of her father’s pet sayings. Not only that, just about everything he stood for made her flesh creep. Yet here he was, Alistair Latimer, human-rights lawyer, friend of terrorists, here in her own living room at her invitation.

She picked up the teapot. ‘Milk and sugar?’

‘Just plain, thank you. Lemon if you have some.’

Her father would have had something to say about that as well. She found half a lemon in the kitchen and sliced off the mould. She had called Latimer out of the blue and had had to convince him it wasn’t a hoax. He had refused to meet her anywhere public or at either of their offices, and wanted it understood that if asked he would flatly deny that they had ever met and expected her to do the same. ‘Whatever works,’ she had told him. He was her last chance to help Jamal and she owed it to Adila’s memory to try.

‘Well, this is a turnaround, eh?’ She’d thought a touch of levity might help things along. He stared at her blankly as she plopped the slice of lemon into his tea. ‘You and me, of all people, getting together like this.’

He stared into his tea. ‘I’m glad you find something to amuse you in these difficult times.’

Pompous twat. And that was a low blow. She had lain awake all night, unable to sleep, thinking about Adila. It was she who had pulled strings and smoothed it with the governor so the girl could visit Jamal … ‘Well, let’s just say that it’s an interesting sign of these difficult times, is it not, that we find we have a common interest?’

‘Do we?’

She felt like slapping him but held it in check. All through her tenure as home secretary, Latimer had been a persistent thorn in her side. High-profile cases against crazed murdering jihadis, men with blood on their hands who should have been bang to rights, had collapsed in court, thanks to his relentless chipping away at the Crown’s case, prising open tiny cracks in the prosecution’s arguments until they were laid bare, yawning wide for all the court to see. He had particularly undermined the credibility of the Metropolitan Police, humiliating its officers as they were repeatedly wrong-footed in trials.

Much as she would have preferred to hold this nasty little man personally responsible, much as she would have liked to denounce him as a friend of terrorists and an enemy of the state, she knew that the problem was not him but the police themselves. When it came to dealing with the huge escalation in terrorist acts and bloody reprisals, they were grotesquely under-resourced. Although there was no love lost between her and Halford, the Met commissioner, she had some sympathy for him in his struggle to meet the expectations of an ever more anxious public.

But they had underestimated the impact of Latimer, the terrorists’ brief of choice in front of juries wishing to see the streets cleared of terror. By the time he had finished, the prosecution’s case was usually in tatters and the judge had to direct them to deliver a not-guilty verdict. And after it was over, he would stand outside the court oozing pious self-righteousness as he delivered his lefty rubbish to the media about defending the downtrodden and oppressed. She eyed him with a mixture of awe and contempt as he took a sip of tea and placed the cup carefully back in its saucer.

She cleared her throat. ‘Well, let’s get on with it, shall we?’

She downed the contents of her cup in three gulps and refilled it. The teapot shook slightly in her hand so that the top rattled. A Scotch would calm that. Maybe if she just nipped into the kitchen …
For God’s sake, woman, get a grip.

‘I know you tried to help Jamal’s sister,’ he said.

‘Much good it did her.’ She reached into her case and drew out one of the two manila folders she had procured, marked MOST SECRET. She placed it on the coffee-table between them, spun it round and pushed it towards Latimer. His eyes widened.

‘The Secret Service report on what happened in Aleppo, suppressed on Rolt’s orders. Go on, take a look. I think you’ll find Jamal comes out of it rather well.’

He opened the folder and scanned it. ‘Your friends in government appear to be hell-bent on the destruction of our civil liberties …’

‘Not my government, not my friends,’ she snapped.

He gave her a weary look. ‘Okay, whatever.’

Biting her lip, she pressed on: ‘It’s pretty comprehensive. It looks as though Abukhan, Jamal’s militia commander, was tipped off just in time. Emma Warner was intercepted as soon as Jamal handed back her camera. And Abukhan arranged Jamal’s passage out of the country.’

Latimer frowned. ‘But why? Why didn’t he kill Jamal too?’

‘Presumably because he wanted to teach the Western media a lesson, and to punish Jamal in a different way by having him blamed for the massacre. Or maybe for the same reason he had Emma’s remains deposited at a British consulate – because he’s a fully paid-up out-there fucking nutcase.’

She had his attention now. ‘Who tipped him off about Emma?’

She shook her head. ‘They don’t know.’

Latimer examined the report. Again, as she watched him, she was plagued by doubt. What was she thinking of, showing secret documents to a card-carrying enemy of the state? Well, to hell with it. Having fallen this far, out of cabinet and into the wilderness, what did it matter if she plummeted even further? She had obtained evidence of Jamal’s innocence from SIS, but he was involved in an audacious jailbreak in which several people had died. It was the knowledge of Rolt’s complicity in suppressing that information which strengthened her resolve. She had Derek Farmer to thank for it, another unlikely ally in what felt like her own personal vendetta against her successor. She had to keep in mind that what she was doing would ultimately be for the greater good.

No doubt Latimer felt he was crossing a line of his own even meeting a former home secretary. And now he was looking at her as if she had gone mad – which might not be far from the truth.

‘He is a fugitive from justice. You are aware of that?’

Garvey ignored the patronizing tone. She reached into her case and produced the second folder, also marked SECRET. ‘The interim report on the Belmarsh bomb, the contents of which have also been blocked by the Home Office. It’s not chapter and verse but it points pretty conclusively to the first bomber inside the visitors’ area as being the wife of Isham al Aziz. The two accomplices who blew themselves up outside the visitors’ entrance have yet to be identified. This was a well-planned attack that must have taken weeks to prepare. Neither Jamal nor his sister could have had anything to do with it. For all we know, al Aziz might even have taken Jamal hostage.’

As Latimer buried himself in the closely typed text uncertainty infected her again. She had made her name for herself as a toughie, a hawk, the twenty-first-century equivalent of a hang-’em-and-flog-’em advocate, a believer in the value of tough prison regimes and long sentences. But not at any price. The more she had come to understand the workings of law and order during her time as home secretary, the more she had discovered the extent to which fair play had been squeezed out of the system, and found herself in a minority of one in cabinet as she railed against the steady erosion of the nation’s most treasured freedoms. Then had come the ultimate ignominy of having to make way for the man who would dismantle the rights of the accused altogether. In Rolt’s new world, you were guilty until proven innocent. And that was not acceptable.

Latimer put down the folder without comment. Was she getting through to him? ‘So, do you know where he is?’

His nostrils flared slightly as he took a deep breath, as if she had just woken him from a trance. He looked at her in horror. ‘Even if I did I would hardly be likely to divulge—’

‘Okay, okay.’ Irritating man. She cut him off. ‘Let me rephrase that. If he were to contact you, you could indicate that there is an interested party, in Parliament, prepared to support him.’

Latimer closed the folder, put it on top of the other and moved them back across the table. Garvey prepared herself for a further humiliation. The man clearly thought she was out of her mind, sharing secret documents with him, talking about helping Britain’s most-wanted fugitive.